I, for one, welcome our new vegetarian overlords.

Category Archives: writing and life

Inspired by a prompt at Today’s Author, I have decided to turn over a new leaf and try actually writing this year instead of procrastinating. In spite of that choice, I present 10 things I will not be writing this year:

1. I will not start a faux reality blog about former child stars raising ostriches, llamas, and platypuses in order to curry the reading audience’s favor (and votes) so as to gain a recording contract, a movie deal, and a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni.

2. I will not try my hand at creating a new fictional genre that combines all the charms of spaghetti westerns, cyberpunk, Gregorian chant, and space opera with the fascinating rhythms of dub-step.

3. I will avoid at all cost spending my days creating odes to the toenails on my girlcat’s rear left paw, no matter how cutely she scratches me with them.

4. I won’t make it a priority to come up with 101 new ways to use pine nuts, sea salt, and coffee grounds just so that I can have the most novelly titled cook book on the internet: Pining for Arabian Seas: 101 Recipes Using Pine Nuts, Sea Salt, and Coffee Grounds.

5. I will resist the urge to create How-To manuals for watching paint dry, herding cats or watching pots boil, not matter how extensive my expertise on the subjects may be.

6. I will not write pro-Martian propaganda, write puff piece interviews of non-terrestrial beings, or answer fan mail on behalf of my alien overlords even if it means a neural whipping, a loss of space cantina privileges, or defenestration via airlock (viva la resistance!).

7. I won’t spend any time at all creating a choose your own adventure novel about the advent of stereoscopic vision in predatory animals or the founding of a new planet by spacefaring slugs, snails, and other soft bodied invertebrates.

8. I won’t even consider publishing an underground leaflet of instant soup recipes and other material subversive to our all powerful alien overlords.

9. I will not develop the technology to write poetry on banana skins without them going brown before anyone can read them just so I can publish my sonnet Banana, Banana, Whose Got the Banana? in the format for which it was originally intended.

10. I will find a way to steer clear of marking down the long awaited songbook for my extemporaneous musical, Why Don’t You Just Go to Flipping Sleep Already?, which was performed in its entirety only once before a less than enthusiastic audience during my oldest child’s infancy.

1. I will not whine about how I want to go vegan only to be lured back to the slightly dimmer side of vegetarianism by the siren call of fried eggs, various cheeses, and desserts with real whipped cream on top. I will just quietly repeat to myself that being vegan is too hard until even the meat eaters start trying to reassure me that I can do it if I really try.
2. I will not text random info-bites to my Dear Daughter during school hours in order to see if she remembered to turn her phone off before she went to class. I will also not try to time it for when she has her least favorite teacher in order to maximize her punishment if she has indeed made that simple mistake that I make all the time. (Do as I say…)
3. I will not lecture the kids just to hear them groan about how they already know why the sky is blue, the complete unabridged history of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and how genetics works. I will also refrain from goading the Little Neighbor Girl into arguing with me about the meanings of words used in anime cartoons that she watches just so I can tell her not to shout in the car.
4. I will not teach the cats to say my Dear Hubby’s name so that he feels obligated to be the one who always feeds them and changes their litter and takes them to the vet when they are all borked up and full of woe.
5. I will not make broccoli just to see my Dear Son writhe on the kitchen floor in anticipatory agony when he has sweetly asked for a well deserved cookie. Later, I will not eat cookies in from of him when I have punished him for throwing a tantrum by taking away both cookies and broccoli.
6. I will not I will not buy my Bug-eyed Little Boston Terrier a hat and booties to go with his jacket and sweaters. He is not so cold that he doesn’t want to retain that last shred of his dignity.
7. I will not teach my kids any more demeaning terms for people who have the very unfortunate habit of eating the carcasses of dead animals is if it were something that a rational human being would do on a regular basis. They already know enough of them and it would be a waste of precious time and resources.
8. I will not assume that everyone who is irresponsible either fiscally, ecologically or socially must be a Republican. Democrats make mistakes sometimes, too (like trusting Republicans).
9. I will not spend any more time ranting about Billy Caxton, who is really the worst thing ever to happen to the English language and directly responsible for my atrocious spelling grades in all years of school. I will also not utter the words “Great Vowel Shift” unless absolutely necessary.
10. I will not write a tenth anti-resolution. (Daggnabit! I broke this one already.)

So lately I’ve been thinking about the Arts. You know, drawing, painting, sculpting, collage, photography, dance, music, theater, film, poetry, fiction: all those creative things that we all used to do or wished we could do when we were children, but don’t always remember to pursue as we become adults with adult responsibilities and less and less time that feels like it is ours to use as we wish.

I’ve come to realize that the times in my life when I have been the most artistic are the times in my life when I have been the most happy. And, those times in my life when I have let art and creativity fall away under the pressure of adult responsibilities have been the times when my come and go depression has come and stayed a while, sometimes a long while.

In about two weeks, my daily life is going to change a bit. I’ve been home with my kids for the last eleven years, but last year my son went to all day kindergarten. For about three weeks, I tried to figure out what I ought to be doing with the six hours of solitude this brought me- then, my neighbor, for whom I’d done before/after school care for her older daughter, got a new job and she needed care for her four year old. My days were not solitary again, so I got a reprieve from having to decide what I wanted to do when I grew up. Now, that same four year old is starting kindergarten and my reprieve is over.

I have a large number of things I should do with that time, a larger number of things I could do with that time, and also a few things I actually want to do with that time. And, it’s not as if I need to have it all worked out by the first day of school, but knowing myself like I do (better than most people, but not as well as my husband, I think) I know I should make some plans so I don’t spiral into laziness and depression as soon as the kids are out the door.

So, I start with lists (at this point, this will get boring, so I don’t mind if you stop reading- really, it’s okay- go read some of my fiction, instead).

is that you have to keep pushing yourself to work at putting something down on paper/computer screen, even if you don’t feel like writing, even if you’ve had a crap-filled day, even if your head is a jumbled up mess because the kids are screaming and the dishwasher is running and you’d gotten the sunburn that wouldn’t say die last week and you have a headache and you are starting to feel really guilty for not doing the laundry and not returning people’s calls or responding to your emails or making comments on other blogger’s posts that you really should have read by now, wanted to read last week, if only your head had been in the place for it, but you’d learned a couple of years ago that you can’t seem to be a reader and a writer at the same time and therefore spending a large amount of your free time reading means you will have writer’s block or spending a large amount of your free time writing means you will have a strange sort of reader’s block in which you hate everything you read, unless you have read it before, regardless of how good or bad it really is.

The other thing about it is that when you do push yourself you come up with some really bad stuff that you will never let others read and you also come up with some really good stuff that you maybe didn’t know you had in you, but you can’t always tell which is which until you get pretty far into it or even to the end, so even though it seems like a piece is a worthless dead-end, you learn to see it through just to make sure that there won’t be a sudden ninety degree turn that makes the thing not just passable, but irrationally fantastic, because the last thing you ought to do is give up on what might have been the best thing you ever wrote.

There is more to learn about it, I’m sure, but that’s what I’ve learned so far.

So, as a writer, I find that having goals helps me to actually sit down and write. A long term plan (like I have for my fiction blog- a post every Friday, rain or shine) will help me push through the moments of writer’s block, even if I’m finishing the week’s post on Friday morning (or afternoon) and a good daily goal like the one required by Nanowrimo will really make me get going. With that in mind, I signed up for AugNoWriMo. I have promised myself that I will write at least 25,000 words of fiction or non-fiction prose during the month of August.

This goal requires me to write about 800 words a day (806.5-ish really), but I can count all kinds of writing, including blog posts, this one included (I have 140 words so far!). I will also be using my work on my serials, some flash fictions for some challenges and a book review or two to get to my goal.

I’ll be posting my word count total at about 10 p.m. each day. I’d like to ask anyone who is following my writing to give me a poke anytime it seems like I haven’t been writing. Hopefully, I’ll avoid being poked at all.

Been thinking about wordpress and how the tag specific pages work to draw the reader in…

See that almost sentence above? ^ It is about the length of the excerpt that the tag specific pages give for each post. Pretty short, huh? That’s what you get to try and entice the random reader in. Made me wonder how better to use those 100 or so characters in the beginning of each post more efficiently. So I made a list…Continue reading →

Ooo- Also, the Spanish speaking Jehovah’s Witnesses came by on Saturday. First time on that, too. They wouldn’t try and teach me about God, though. They only had materials in Spanish and the little Spanish I have retained from high school might be enough to get me help, food or a toilet in a Spanish speaking country, but not enough to give me salvation (I guess).

Kind of wondering if it’s all some kind of sign. Maybe I should take up Spanish again (in copious amounts of free time).

Race- ethnicity- is a weird subject- it makes people prickly, but it is not one I’m afraid to write about. I do, however, need a reason to write about it; otherwise I tend to let it fade into the background most of the time. A couple of small things have happened lately to make me think about ethnicity and how I might appear to the world- especially on paper/monitor and I felt a need to examine that.

Contrary to what one might expect from my name, from a standpoint of my genes and my upbringing, I’m all kinds of white and not a bit Hispanic. Genetically, I am Western European- British Isles, France, Germany, Switzerland and such. In person, people take me for Irish often enough, even though I have only the tiniest bit of it in my background. Socially, I grew up in a mid to upper middle class town in central New Jersey, and there was some diversity among the people there when I was a child. It increased as I grew up since our town became a desirable area for many Asians and Muslims, so I got input that said that people are people and only the details change. I am white any way you define it.

Virginia Diaz

Who I Am~

A writer
A woman
A mother
A wife
A daughter
A friend
A Catholic
A New Jerseyan
A singer
A dancer
A composer
A poet
An artist
A seamstress
A dreamer
A troublemaker
An optimist
A thousand other indefinable things yet to come . . .